Wanna come? It’s Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014 at NYU

* Studio 20 graduates will present their final projects in newsroom innovation.
* Drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be served. Conversation will be had.
* Luminaries of the digital journalism community in New York will be there.
* Josh Benton, director of Harvard’s Nieman Lab, will present his slide show: “The Year in Innovation.”

Greetings from the Studio 20 program at NYU (description): still the world’s only studio program in journalism education, focused on innovation, project-based learning, and figuring out where news needs to go.

Every year at the fall term draws to a close we put on Open Studio night, in which the program’s graduating students present their final projects in innovation, which they have spent six months working on. This year’s group includes projects on:

* equipping all reporters in a newsroom with the skills to do data visualization
* tapping the methods of science fiction to report on the near future of Big Data
* re-designing email newsletters to meet the demands of busy and mobile readers
* extending a site’s news voice to short form video on platforms like Instagram
* giving a site for Chinese immigrant women a complete digital upgrade

And eight more! As we did last year, we have asked Josh Benton, director of Nieman Lab, to review the year in journalism innovation and prepare a slide show that presents the highlights: the companies, the products, the tools, the people, and the ideas that pushed journalism forward this year. I think this will be very instructive.

So please make plans to join us: Thursday, December 11 at NYU Journalism, 20 Cooper Square, New York, NY, 7th floor. Cocktails, finger food and chatter, 6 pm. Presentations begin: 6:30 sharp. You’re done by 8 pm, but can hang out and drink with us after.

You can RSVP by emailing me, Jay Rosen, at this address: jr3[at]nyu.edu Include your name, affiliation and how you heard about the event. When we’re full I will take this post down.

Few issues ignite such passion among the base of both parties. Democrats argue that the laws are intended to keep poor voters away from the polls because they often have difficulty obtaining identification. Republicans contend cheating is rife in today’s elections.

Which is a classic “he said, she said” observation. I thought we were past this point already, but I guess not. Evidently, Jeremy Peters and his editors at the Times think the practice is still acceptable. I don’t, and I think a lot of Times readers don’t.

Thus:

"There's a factual dispute and we have no idea who's right" journalism will eventually be seen as low quality news. http://t.co/my6fZJKmgw

I’m going to write about this “Democrats argue/Republicans contend” paragraph at my flagship site, PressThink. This notebook post is just a stub. (“In Wikipedia, a stub is a short article in need of expansion.”) The glaring lameness of “he said, she said” is not a new subject for me. I’ve been writing about it for five years. So I’m looking for new ways to get the point across. If you have comments and links that should be included in my fuller post, you may share them here.

Journalists tend to be obsessed with scoops, meaning: the first to break the news, and being seen as the first, which means getting credit for it among peers.

But not all scoops are created equal. I see four main types. The politics of credit-claiming vary, depending on which type of scoop we’re talking about.

Type One: The enterprise scoop. Where the news would not have come out without the enterprising work of the reporter who dug it out. A classic example: CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons. Dana Priest broke that story. If she hadn’t, we would not have known about it. All credit should go to her, and when others report what she first reported they should say: “As first reported by Dana Priest of the Washington Post…” If they don’t, they suck! This is the classical meaning of “scoop,” and the one all others try to invoke when they use the term. It’s the most important, the most valid, the most useful… and of course the rarest. We should be grateful to journalists who pull it off. So feel free to thank them!

Type Two: The ego scoop. The extreme opposite of an enterprise scoop is the ego scoop. This is where the news would have come out anyway–typically because it was announced or would have been announced–but some reporter managed to get ahead of the field and break it before anyone else. From the user’s point of view, there is zero significance to who got it first. This kind of scoop is essentially meaningless, but try telling that to the reporter who feels he or she has one. Just today we had a classic example. Departure of Disney exec sparks Twitter spat over crediting scoops. Journalists who are defending an ego scoop are engaged in an intramural competition that has nothing to do with public service, and everything to do with bragging rights. Feel free to make fun of them! (I do.)

Type Three: The traders scoop. This is the most ambiguous of my categories. It recognizes that there can be situations in which, for the general public, “who got it first?” is next-to meaningless, but for a special category of user–the traders, investors, arbitrageurs–minutes and even seconds can count. A good illustration would be this false report on the death of Steve Jobs. Had it been true, it would have been market-moving information. It briefly affected Apple’s share price even though it was wrong. Had it been right, the reporter who got it two minutes before anyone else would have had a scoop barely meaningful to the general public (which would have found out anyway) but extremely valuable to investors or potential investors in Apple stock. If you’re a trader, be sure to follow such journalists. If you’re not, feel free to ignore their credit-claiming games. Type Two scoopers will try to describe their scoops as Type Three, so watch out!

Type Four: The thought scoop. The most under-recognized type of scoop is the intellectual scoop: “stories with new insights” that coin terms, define trends, or apprehend–name and frame–something that’s happening out there… before anyone else recognizes it. ”When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way, that’s something,” said a New York Times editor in describing this kind of story, also called a conceptual scoop. One of the most famous examples is Broken Windows, an Atlantic magazine article that captured a different way of policing that turned out to have enormous influence on crime and punishment in the United States. Feel free to admire those who are capable of such feats. I certainly do.

I should probably mention a fifth type: the “forever exclusive.” This refers to a story that remains exclusive–meaning, no one ever picks it up, or repeats it–because it turns out to be wrong. Not the kind of scoop a reporter wants to be known for.

About a year ago I wrote: Anatomy of a Twitter Screw-up: My Own. It was a post about a serious error I made on Twitter, linking two things that had no connection and thereby suggesting that someone did something he did not do. Since then, I haven’t screwed up like that.

Until last week: April 4th.

It started with this report in the Washington Post by Dan Zak: Woodward and Bernstein: Could the Web generation uncover a Watergate-type scandal? Zak’s article is about a panel discussion at the American Society of News Editors, which was titled: Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age? On the panel were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, among others. Woodward told of a class of college students at Yale who were asked to write papers on a similar theme. The instructor sent Woodward the papers and asked if he could read them and talk to the students on speakerphone:

“So I got them on a Sunday, and I came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm, because the students wrote that, ‘Oh, you would just use the Internet and you’d go to “Nixon’s secret fund” and it would be there.’ ”

“This is Yale,” Bernstein said gravely.

“That somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events,” Woodward said. “And they went on to say the political environment would be so different that Nixon wouldn’t be believed, and bloggers and tweeters would be in a lather and Nixon would resign in a week or two weeks after Watergate.”

A small ballroom of journalists — which included The Washington Post’s top brass, past and present — chuckled or scoffed at the scenario.

When I read that I immediately doubted it, especially this part: The students wrote that, ‘Oh, you would just use the Internet and you’d go to “Nixon’s secret fund” and it would be there.’” It just seemed… off to me. I have been teaching the born-on-the-web generation for a while now. It’s true that their knowledge of American history can sometimes be alarmingly thin, but among those with an interest in journalism I have not encountered an attitude like: “investigative reporting equals looking things up on the Internet.” I thought Woodward had taken some naive stuff the students had written and made it sound worse than it was, in “these kids today…” fashion.

So I expressed myself in a short Facebook posting, which included the link to Dan Zak’s story. This is what it said:

I don’t even believe this anecdote about moronic Yale students that Bob Woodward used to illustrate how clueless young people are today about journalism. It sounds made-up or very, very distorted from something one of them wrote.

Now that is something I should not have posted. I should not have typed it into that little “Update Status” box. Once I typed it, my internal editor should have started flashing and beeping until I changed it or killed it. Because it sounds like I’m saying he made up the whole thing, as if the Yale incident never happened. That’s bad.

Over the weekend I was contacted by Micah Sifry, co-founder of techpresident.com and someone I know from many a conference. (We both study the Internet and we’re friends.) He explained to me that he too was struck by the story about Yale students and wondered if it happened that way, or got distorted somehow in the telling. He decided to do a post at techpresident about it. So he contacted Woodward to ask him for clarification. Woodward read him some quotes from the students’ papers that, according to Sifry, did indeed suggest extreme naïveté about what it takes to investigate a story like Watergate, as well as a breezy over-confidence in the Internet’s powers.

The part that had jumped out at me… Oh, you would just use the Internet and you’d go to “Nixon’s secret fund” and it would be there…. was not among the quotes Woodward read to Sifry. But he said there were sentiments that came pretty close to that. He also revealed a screw-up of his own. This is from the techpresident site:

For a few minutes earlier today, a draft post that I am still working on was accidentally published on this site. The draft was tentatively titled, “Did Bob Woodward Make Up His Anti-Yale Internet Story?” and was on the question raised earlier this week by Woodward at the American Society of Newspaper Editors, about how Watergate might have unfolded differently if the Internet had existed then. I have egg on my face, since the story was not finished when it was accidentally published, and I was in the process of tracking down various participants for their comments. I could blame Drupal for reverting to a default setting after I made a small change in the draft, but that would be bogus. I messed up.

One of those participants was me. He needed to contact me because he had used my Facebook post (“I don’t even believe this anecdote…”) in his draft, which was mistakenly published before it was done. Woodward had seen it. And Woodward was livid about what I’d said, to the point where he told Sifry that he thought I should resign from NYU. Sifry’s finished post is now published. You can read it–including Woodward’s comments about me–here. Sifry also got in touch with the instructor in the Yale class, Steve Brill. He backed Woodward’s account.

Patrick Hogan, a young journalist at the Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was one of those who commented at my Facebook page. He wrote:

I’d like to hear from some of these Yale students to find out if their papers did in fact just amount to “Google ‘Nixon’s secret fund.'”

Patrick Hogan had it right. I was wrong. The way he put it is the way I should have put it. I had a visceral reaction to that quote… you’d go to “Nixon’s secret fund” and it would be there… but that’s exactly why I should have waited to post my comment: so I could examine it with a cooler eye. And that’s what it was: a comment (38 words) not an attempt to report on the episode.

Still, I have 8,000+ subscribers on Facebook. I knew I was commenting publicly. I teach journalism and I study the Internet. I know a lot about how to avoid these things. That of course makes it worse. So there won’t be any “In my own defense…” paragraph. There is no defense. I apologize to Mr. Woodward. I’m sorry I wrote that, Bob. I was wrong. Full stop.

I also agree with the main point of his story: in big works of investigative journalism the truth that needs to get out usually lies with human sources. (Sometimes with documents, most of which are not online.) It is the job of the reporter to find those people and get them to reveal what they know. The internet can help, but it is not some “magic lantern” that illuminates everything.

Hopefully I will not be back here soon with another one of these “anatomy of…” posts. They’re necessary, but I do not enjoy writing them.

I don’t do political commentary. This piece–a departure from my normal work–will demonstrate why…

When I say brief, I mean 56 words. Here it is:

A Brief Theory of the Republican Party: 2012

In so far as a political party in the United States can “decide” anything, the party decided not to have the fight it needed to have between reality-based Republicans and the other kind. And so it is having that fight now, during the 2012 election season, but in disguised form. The results are messy and confusing.

Given the state of our political discourse, one should expect to be misunderstood with a theory like this. There is no way to prevent that, but I will try to qualify some of the key phrases.

1.) When I say “reality-based Republicans” I mean those who recognize the danger in trying to make descriptions of the world conform to their wishes. By the “other kind” I mean those who don’t. Or: members of the Republican coalition who exhibit certain behaviors F.A. Hayek wrote about in 1960. This quotation was dug up by Chis Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science. It is from Hayek’s essay, “Why I am Not a Conservative.”

Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it – or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called “mechanistic” explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position.

2.) Readers will want to know what I have in mind when I refer to “members of the Republican coalition who do not recognize the dangers of trying to make descriptions of the world conform to their wishes.” These four examples capture the tendencies I’m talking about, but it’s the tendencies I’m talking about, not the examples! Still, here they are: The Birthers, a relatively “fringe” group who had a nice run for a while, though they were ultimately put down; global warming denialism, which is fast becoming a mainstream Republican position; the debt limit fight in the summer of 2011, which House Republicans started (so it’s difficult to say that was “fringe…”) and the claim that President Obama is actually a socialist, which is so common on the right as to almost sound banal these days.

Now it’s not just that those things happened. It’s that the people willing to believe that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S…. that global warming isn’t happening and the evidence for it has been faked by scientists with a political agenda… that the Congress could refuse to raise the debt limit and thereby send a message about fiscal discipline without wreaking havoc for the U.S. economy… or that the President isn’t a mainstream liberal who believes in a vigorous role for government within an economy dominated by the private sector, but rather a full-on socialist who would if he could dismantle the system of lightly-to-tightly regulated capitalism that presidents of both parties have supported since the close of World War Two… these people vote, they volunteer, they donate money, they form organizations that are part of the fabric of the Republican party, they get elected to office, they hold hearings in Congress to make their points, they talk on the radio and try to influence other Republicans, they attack reality-based Republicans as apostates– and in all these ways they loom larger and larger within the party.

3.) For a representative figure among reality-based Republicans I would go with David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a conservative who cannot stomach what has happened to his party. But rather than become a Democrat or claim some sort of ideological conversion, Frum has taken up his pen, as with: When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? There he writes:

Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

Frum again:

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat.

Because he wouldn’t stop with this kind of thing (“a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts…”) Frum was dismissed from his position at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading Republican think thank, and dropped from further appearances on Fox News, though the network never announced or explained that decision. Frum is also a despised figure in the conservative blogosphere, where it is assumed that the reason he talks this way is that he wants liberals to love him. My point is that Frum is willing to have the fight that the rest of his party did not want to have.

4.) F.A. Hayek is an intellectual god within the conservative moment. David Frum was a good soldier and solid citizen who worked in a Republican White House. My purpose in quoting them is to underline that what matters about the flight from reality within the Republican coalition is that it’s an internal struggle. What liberal college professors like me think about it is irrelevant to the outcome of that struggle. What happened to David Frum matters; what I say about it does not. Reality-based Republicans will either realize the threat to their existence and fight it out with the other kind of Republican, or… they won’t. So far they haven’t. That’s a mistake. It’s bad for the country, it’s bad for the political system, it’s bad for the Democrats (because it breeds complacency and arrogance in the opposition) and it’s catastrophic for the Republicans as a governing party.

5. So I’m not saying that the Democrats and progressives are the ones who are in touch with reality, while conservatives and Republicans are not. (But I guarantee you some will read it that way.) I’m saying that the tendency toward wish fulfillment, selective memory, ideological blindness, truth-busting demagoguery and denial of the inconvenient fact remains within normal trouble-making bounds for the Democratic coalition. But it has broken through the normal limits on the Republican side, an historical development that we don’t understand very well. That is, we don’t know the reasons for it, why it happened when it did, or what might reverse it. (We also need to know the degree to which it is a global phenomenon among conservative parties in mature democracies, or an American thing.) Political scientists: help!

6. Mitt Romney, the favorite to win the Republican nomination for president in 2012, is a reality-based Republican who cannot run as a reality-based Republican because he thinks he cannot win that way. Jon Huntsman’s campaign is the proof of that calculation. All the candidates, including Romney, have to make gestures toward the alternative knowledge system, with its own facts. Overlaid on this pattern are the normal tensions between more ideological conservatives and what the press calls moderates, the usual conflicts among the libertarian strain, the corporate Republicans and the social conservatives. Journalists feel comfortable talking about these. They have no acceptable language for discussing reality-based Republicans vs. the other kind. So they don’t. The result is a confusing mess.